October 28/November 4, 2019 The Nation. 35
to the judges’ right-wing attitudes, deploy
“quick swerves into the folksy,” and, when
on the ropes, resort to a style of verbal
overkill known as “the spread.” “Spreading”
one’s opponent means “to make more argu-
ments, marshal more evidence than the oth-
er team can respond to within the allotted
time, the rule being among serious debaters
that a ‘dropped argument,’ no matter its
quality, its content, is conceded.” It’s a kind
of rhetorical carpet-bombing.
The sections of The Topeka School chron-
icling Adam’s debate career—which re-
cycle, update, and fictionalize material from
Lerner’s 2012 Harper’s essay “Contest of
Words”—are rich in realistic detail, but
they’re also the novel’s most tendentious. It’s
the one area where Lerner consistently over-
reaches, attempting to transform his own
extracurricular activities into an improbable
allegory for the decline of American public
discourse. The spread, in Lerner’s eyes, is not
just a debater’s tactic; it comes to epitomize
a multitude of national sins. “Corporate per-
sons deployed a version of the spread all the
time,” he writes, in television commercials
for prescription drugs and “the list of rules
and caveats read rapid-fire at the end of pro-
motions on the radio.” The spread is yet an-
other form of verbal spell, a use of language
not to communicate but to dominate:
These types of disclosure were de-
signed to conceal; they exposed you to
information that, should you challenge
the institution in question, would be
treated like a “dropped argument” in a
fast round of debate—you have already
conceded the validity of the point by
failing to address it when it was pre-
sented. It’s no excuse that you didn’t
have the time. Even before the twenty-
four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms,
algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the
DDoS attack, Americans were getting
“spread” in their daily lives; mean-
while, their politicians went on speak-
ing slowly, slowly about values utterly
disconnected from their policies.This passage is a tour de force, but it’s a
tour de force of conspiracy theory, uniting a
range of complex phenomena under a pen-
umbra of paranoia. Lurking beneath it is the
evergreen populist idea that ordinary Amer-
icans are actively deceived by cynical power
elites, that the masses’ false consciousness is
the result of a manipulative and dishonest use
of rhetoric. (What’s the matter with Kansas?)
But such an argument—and Lerner must
know this—is in fact an instance of “spread”
in its own right, hiding a fuzzy causal logic
under a false sense of comprehensiveness.
Did Donald Trump get elected by people who
were confused about what he really thought?
Who needs the spread when you can simply
pander to your base’s basest instincts?
A similar problem arises with Peter
Evanson, Adam’s debate coach and the nov-
el’s flattest character. He’s clearly cast as
The Topeka School’s Mephistopheles (or is
it Darth Vader?), tempting Adam to use
his verbal gifts for evil. As the child of
transplanted coastal liberals—a “red-diaper
kid from a red state”—Adam is inoculated
against Evanson’s right-wing ideology, but
even if he “was rarely if ever swayed by a
position...he was with every passing hour
absorbing an interpersonal style it would
take him decades fully to unlearn.” (And
this style, we’re given to understand, is not
unrelated to the wider culture of misogyny
in Topeka and America at large. Adam’s
parents, watching him in competition, are
dismayed by his aggressiveness, his propen-
sity for rhetorical bullying. Jane worries that
she has “offered my boy up to the wrong
tutelage...offered him to the Men, thinking
he would somehow know better.”)
In 1996, Adam blithely assumes that
Evanson is “on the wrong side of the history
that ended with [Bob] Dole,” that American
conservatives are “doomed.... The elector-
ate, Adam had read in The Economist, would
grow increasingly diverse and the Repub-
licans would die off as a national party....
Adam wanted to believe it was the end of the
age of angry white men proclaiming the end
of civilization.” In passages like this, Ler-
ner’s irony—usually so finely calibrated—is
a blunderbuss. The links he wants to make,
here and elsewhere, between the libertarian
conservatism of 1990s Topeka and the vir-
ulent ethnopopulism of the current admin-
istration feel strained, a novelistic conceit
rather than a political insight. Whatever
one can say about the ideological and demo-
graphic continuities underlying the evolu-
tion of the Republican Party since 1996, it’s a
long way from Bob Dole to Donald Trump.T
he Topeka School, when all is said and
done, is still a poet’s novel, in both
its language—subtly studded with
phrases from and allusions to Dante,
Keats, Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden,
and John Ashbery (Adam’s idol, who makes
a cameo appearance as a character)—and
its themes. This accounts for its many
strengths as well as its occasional weak-
nesses. Poets are prone to overestimate
the political importance of language—it’san occupational hazard—and to decry the
distance between public rhetoric and poetry.
Practitioners of what Lerner has called an
“art [that] assumes the dislike of its audi-
ence” are inclined to associate one kind of
speech (poetry) with all that is righteous
and holy, and its putative opposite (prose,
in its various forms—high school debate,
novels, advertising, economics textbooks)
with the worldly and the fallen. This kind of
adversarial discourse, as Lerner observed in
his 2016 critical treatise The Hatred of Poetry,
goes back at least as far as the 19th century,
when poets felt the need to “assert the rel-
evance of the art for a (novel-reading) mid-
dle class preoccupied with material things.”
They did this by recasting poetry’s “distance
from material reality as a virtuous alterna-
tive to our insatiable hunger for money and
things, credit and cattle.”
Note that Lerner here puts the novel on
the side of material reality and the middle
class, poetry on the side of the virtuous and
the virtual. The contest of forms that has
been raging throughout his literary work is
apparently resolved in favor of poetry—but
only apparently. After all, if novels are expres-
sions of middle-class materialism and poetry
is a “virtuous alternative,” why write novels
(unless you need the money)?
This is the theoretical question that Ler-
ner’s practice—his persistence in writing
novels—continues to put to him. In The
Topeka School he tries to keep faith with the
poetic, rejecting a debased public, prosaic
rhetoric (“the spread”) for the unworldly,
utopian language of poetic possibility. But
he does so, paradoxically, through a novel,
not a poem. By embedding a utopian faith
in poetry within the bourgeois compro-
mise of the novel, Lerner makes his most
compelling case yet for poetry. Which is
perhaps why it’s a good thing that he keeps
on deciding to write fiction, whatever his
poet friends may think.
On its own terms, Lerner’s neo-Romantic
theory of poetry as pure potential is a bit
thin and self-serving; it seems designed to
assuage poets’ sense of obsolescence rath-
er than make a real claim for their art’s
significance. Enveloped within a fictional
narrative, though, in tension with other
ideas (family-systems theory, free-market
economics, fundamentalist dogma, teenage
macho bullshit) that are shown to be just as
compelling and just as inadequate, it takes
on a dialectical strength it wouldn’t have on
its own. Which is only to say what the poet
in Lerner may not want to admit but The
Topeka School, almost despite itself, confirms:
I think he’s a novelist. Q